Introduction

Around the Anglo-American world, democracy is said to be in a state of ill health. This is typified in a 2005 American Political Science Association/Brookings Institution report which argued:

American democracy is at risk. The risk comes not from some external threat but from disturbing internal trends: an erosion of the activities and capacities of citizenship. Americans have turned away from politics and the public sphere in large numbers, leaving our civic life impoverished. Citizens participate in public affairs less frequently, in fewer venues, and less equally than is healthy for a vibrant democratic polity.

(cited in Dalton, 2011a, 2) This is no case of ‘American exceptionalism.’ In fact, there is widespread concern that citizens in many advanced democracies have become disengaged from politics (see Norris, 2001, 217). These concerns are not altogether new. In the eighteenth century Rousseau complained that ‘we no longer have citizens’ and in 1924 Arthur M. Schlesinger and Erik M. Erikson wrote of ‘the vanishing voter’ and bemoaned a lack of civic obligation among citizens (Schudson, 1998, 190, 295). Nevertheless, these concerns are thought to have become particularly acute of late. Around the Anglo-American democracies the nature of political engagement seems to be changing and for many commentators these trends are deeply alarming.